Megan McShea

from A Mountain City of Toad Splendor


The Brain Is a Pleasure Organ

In a shell, after a rain, cold, bright morning, after a spell, beside likenesses to past women or men, standing, awful and goaded, along a road for passing by, like it’s fun, like we stupidly became serious for years and years, after dying, there in the house, pretending it’s hard, happy to pretend.

When the warm, after shadows pulled back when the world spins, when the warm drapes the air and the light pours towards us, in a tree, picking leaves, making comparisons, apples and oranges, this that. Smallest sounds, churning & churched, by light, by afterthoughts, plunging and skimming, finding a level path. A likeness of apparitions stands, making its meaning noises. “More words, no god, no more.” There it stands, like supper warmed her. Evening closed in again to say again the same words, the same summer, the same spell over and over, like a lark, whoo-ooing, like a mention, murmured in the best time, for a moment, for some sordid afterthought crumbling sight unseen under it all. It was night.

But the weightless light, spilled over the ridge, brings tiny voices, greatness dwindling, a day, likened to a mouth, mouthing something about the brain, about the brain being a pleasure organ.

---

11 Irritations That Morning

I want things and beautiful
light, a perfectly soft don’t.
It’s my 9th most enormous
successful feeling, timed upon an at.
Only I got busy and now, gee,
I don’t remember entering
the pleasures and that elation—
don’t scare me. Maybe there
wasn’t this dangerous surface.
Maybe there was just the destination,
when a trunk full of minutiae
that scare me are there, and mundane
ideas that scare that death refreshment.
I could bring you until it’s dirty again,
and give you things with sparkling horror.
Don’t you have a room of culinary experiments
that can sort the bathroom holidays?

on the street, that recently-cleaned texture
of things. To be alone daily makes
everyone seem interesting

Megan McShea’s A Mountain City of Toad Splendor is forthcoming from Publishing Genius.